Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So I've been thinking about this recent problem with nazis, racists, and racist aplogists on IAM. It's always interesting to note what cowards they are, hiding and snivelling and backtracking and coming up with various excuses. You'd think that some of them would have the courage to at least stand up for themselves and say “this is what I'm about, fuck you, I don't want to be on your race-trader queer-loving site” and set up their own system. But as a group they're just too stupid and pathetic to do so, and have no choice but to be servile to the people they despise because their lack of talent and ability is so absolute that they are incapable of standing independently…

It's rather hilarious to watch degenerate aryans congratulate each other and joke about it, but I suppose these sad attitudes are the products of sad lives. I guess when it comes down to it I probably feel more sorry for them than anything — it's really a pitiful existence having to live in a dark hole filled with hate and fear, boasting about your strength while you cower in weakness. The only part I find a little disturbing is how readily the average person is willing to turn a blind eye and pretend it doesn't affect them, but I suppose that's the reason that most of the crap in this world persists.

Meh, now that “the list” has been made, maybe one of these afternoons I should have myself my own little Blitzkrieg and delete every last one of them without warning or notice. Maybe I'll delete one a day, at high noon, every day for two months. That might be fun… “Racist of the day execution!” Ah, so Saudi Arabia. Maybe I'll start deleting them on their birthdays, that seems appropriately sadistic… That certainly did seem to be the consensus of most IAM members as to what should be done. So if you're an ignorant racist fuck, or you play one in real life, you might want to do that deletion before I do it for you. You're even welcome to ask for a refund for your remaining time.

Yeah, it's about time for a witchhunt.

If you're gonna kill, do it with style and a sense of humor*.

Anyway… Charles “Mr. Torture” Graner — also proud of his great white heritage — has gotten ten years in prison. That's him on the right giving the big thumbs up for his service to the United States of America. You might be surprised to hear that I think that the sentence is a load of crap. Personally I don't think he deserves even a day in prison (although he does deserve a dishonorable discharge, and probably needs some serious counselling). I think the way this whole thing has been handled shows how scared the system is of taking any blame itself.

Graner's the “ringleader”? Give me a break.

There's one of two possible scenarios. First, it could be as Graner says, and the orders came from above. Certainly there's a lot of paperwork — cough — Alberto Gonzalez — strongly suggesting that's the truth. CACI International and Titan, military contracting firms, were implicated in coordinating this torture and helped run the prisons.

* Don't assume I'm kidding.

The other possible scenario is that Graner and the other guards simply lost it under a stressful situation that they weren't properly trained for. For those of you who don't know the Stanford Prison Experiment story, consider reading that now. Humans are not designed to be used in this way, and they break when you try and force them. Especially cowardly racist scum like Graner. As soon as a person starts concerning themselves with the immalleable elements of their or someone else's humanity, you can say with certainty that their thinking processes have failed in some way.

Either way, blaming Graner, let alone calling him the ringleader, is deceitful. Now, maybe you're asking yourself what punishment the corporations that ran the whole thing got (since as you know, Alberto Gonzalez who laid out the legal framework for the torture was promoted to Attorney General)… that “punishment” is a new $16 million contract for CACI, and a whopping $164 million renewal for Titan — a company that is also being investigated for fraud and embezzlement of government funds.

Don't even bother trying to talk to George “God made me do it” Bush about any of this. As far as he's concerned, America is 100% behind him — the election “ratified” his actions in Iraq — so I guess that means the President has officially “blamed” Republicans? Well, thanks for all the new terrorists. That's showing moxie, Mr. President. When New York City loses another landmark, you'll really have stuck it to those liberals in the Blue States that don't know what's good for them or the nation.

# # #

I'll remind you again that as of September — three months ago — the bill for Iraq alone was well over $100 billion dollars. Now, I'll give you another reminder. The total cost for solving, permanently, the problems of health, poverty, starvation, and so on for the entire planet is considered by the highly conservative World Bank to be $80 billion.

So…

** What, somehow it's America's responsibility to fix the world? It's our collective duty and we all failed.

These were your choices America World**:

1. $100 billion and counting wasted on Iraq. Well over a thousand Americans dead, tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, and a terror breeding gound that almost guarantees more devastating attacks on the US homeland are inevitable.

       or…

2. Save $20 billion and get a world that no longer knows hunger, poverty, or preventable disease.

According to Bush and the Republican voters, America made the right choice with option number one. Do you agree? Was it the wise and prudent path? Has it kept America as that shining beacon that we all fantasize and dream and hope that it should be? I believe option two could take America to that place.

Graner gets ten years in prison, people keep dying, people keep getting rich, and the whole while Bush laughs and cracks jokes about not finding any WMDs. Who are the real criminals? And the real soulless evil? And what can be done about it***?

*** This time I am kidding. Don't got out buying yourself a sniper rifle, it's not going to solve the problem.

My apologies to someone for not remembering what blog I saw this Russian diving forum linked from, but the deep sea fish that the tsunami has tossed onto the beaches (click for the real story) are pretty freaky, and they're just the common ones — this is “normal”, in relative terms.

You know how they say that the rainforest is full of hundreds of thousands of species of plant and animal that we haven't even identified yet? The deep ocean environment pushes that even farther — it contains entire classes of life that we've barely seen the tip of the iceberg of, everything from bizarre creatures that live on the volcanic vent ecosystems to immense beasts with unrecognizable anatomies lurking below — as Melville put it, “calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive.”

While I do watch with great excitement mankind's exploration of Titan, and am keeping my fingers crossed that in its methane oceans we find another world of gliding monsters, there are worlds of life on our own planet that we fragile and short-sighted land dwellers are blind to. Here where I live, on the Sea of Cortez, deep chasms of alien life extend into the bowels of the ocean, and storms, while rare, expel prehistoric eels thirty feet in length from caves miles below — to say nothing of the kraken, or as fishermen here call it, el Rojo Diablo. The Red Demon.

Photos: Scott Cassel

As large as seven hundred pounds in weight and three times as long as a man, they grab ahold of swimmers and divers with strength no human can overcome, dragging them into the depths, shredding them in seconds to bloody pulp with their twenty-five thousand teeth. Divers here often operate wearing armor and attached to their boats with steel cable to avoid this watery demise.

That said, it's better that than a safe, dead ocean. The whales will be alright.

"They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent."
                    - D.H. Lawrence, Whales Weep Not